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openDemocracy
has teamed up with Friends of the Earth to commission a series, 'Tales from Britain's climate change front line', about how
people in the UK are already experiencing the impacts of global
warming - and what can be done about it.

"There's
where we lost a whole street, 26 homes", says Malcolm, gesturing
towards the sea. I look: there's nothing there now save a
precipitous, crumbling cliff, tumbling down towards the crashing
waves thirty feet below. We peer over the cliff edge, gingerly.

Malcolm
Kerby is not your typical campaigner. Born in Blackheath, his South
London accent still with him, he moved here to Happisburgh in North
Norfolk many years ago. He drove lorries, ran an insulation business,
and used to sell fast cars to rich businessmen. Now in his seventies,
he only recently sold his motorbike. And for the past fifteen years,
he has campaigned tirelessly to protect his town being engulfed by
the sea.

Happisburgh
is a small coastal town, situated on a stretch of coastline that is
eroding at an alarming rate. This part of the coast would erode
naturally anyway - its shore is soft alluvial soils rather than hard
rock - but after the Great Flood of 1953 it was fortified with
defences that slowed the depredations of the waves. Yet in the past
twenty years, two things have changed that. First, rising sea levels
and increased storminess in the North Sea have accelerated the pace
of erosion. And second, the defences have been allowed to collapse -
resulting in the sea claiming hundreds of metres of shore, including
35 homes.

As
we walk along the eroding cliffs, staring down at Happisburgh's
wrecked defences languishing in the sea, Malcolm tells us about his
campaigns. His anecdotes are countless and hilarious: from the
battles he's waged with Ministers ('that one was totally useless';
'Owen Paterson? He was a complete walking disaster'), to his
frustrations with pettifogging bureaucracy and his delight at once
pretending to know a Lord to prove a point about politicians.

Or
like when he stood up at the end of a Parliamentary event and
challenged the then Environment Minister to tell him how much funding
was being given to defend coastal areas. The Minister had no idea. So
Malcolm told him, and when his advisers said no, that number was far
too low, he offered to make a public and grovelling apology once they
checked their figures. A few days later, he received a letter from
Defra. It began: "You are right..."

Malcolm's
frustrations - and the plight of places like Happisburgh - stem from
an extraordinary and obscure law: the Coast Protection Act 1949. This
law made the provision of flood defences entirely voluntary. As a
result, the government has always refused to pay any compensation to
households who lose their homes to the sea.

That's
the raw deal that coastal communities like Happisburgh face: not only
might you lose your home and life savings to the ocean (having not
been able to get insurance for it in the first place), you stand no
chance of recompense afterwards either. To add insult to injury, in
the mid-2000s, the government proposed something even worse. In 2004
new plans for managing the North Norfolk coast were leaked, and they
contained a bombshell. They proposed that continuing to defend the
coast against rising seas was untenable in the long run, and that
instead the government should abandon a huge stretch of the Norfolk
coast. Understandably, this sparked uproar.

Malcolm
and the community group he helped found, Coastal Concern Action
Group, campaigned vociferously against the plan - and after
organising packed public meetings, generating national coverage and
embarrassing the then Labour government, the plans were dropped.

Malcolm
isn't against abandoning sections of coast to rising seas (or
'managed realignment' as it is rather euphemistically called); it's
how it's managed that he takes issue with. People need time to adapt
to climate change, and adaptation needs to be done fairly. So it
understandably irks when communities are expected to cope with an
encroaching sea, but no policy of resettlement from the government.
And it grates when some parts of the coast - such as the Bacton gas
terminal just north of Happisburgh or Sea Palling just south - get
lavished with defences, when Happisburgh residents get none.

What
CCAG and Malcolm are proposing isn't pouring more concrete into the
sea, but rather a socially just plan for adaptation. They want to see
a gradual rollback of homes from the crumbling seafront, with
homeowners given support to move to new homes further inland.

Friends
of the Earth agrees. We think the government should compensate
households who lose their homes to rising seas. It's a matter of
social justice, and a vital piece in the jigsaw if we're to adapt the
UK properly to climate change. After all, failing to prevent climate
change has a huge cost, and it's one that should be borne by the
government, not just lumped onto the most vulnerable. And if the
politicians balk at the cost of compensation, they'd better knuckle
down to preventing climate change from making the problem even
bigger.

You
can read more about Friends of the Earth's work on flooding and
climate change here.